Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week we began our exploration of Apple’s Mail application. Having read through that lesson, you’re familiar with the makeup of the Mail window. This week we’ll turn from geography to communication—creating, sending, and retrieving email. Taking it from the top ...
The New Message window
Click the toolbar’s New Message button, or press Command-N, and the New Message window appears. It has its own toolbar that contains, by default, the following buttons: Send Message, Attach Document, Show Format Bar, Show/Hide Photo Browser, and Show/Hide Stationery Pane. Like Mail’s toolbar, this one is also customizable. Just Control-click (right-click) the toolbar, choose Customize Toolbar, and from the sheet that appears drag the tools you want to the toolbar. From this moment forward, those buttons will appear in every New Message window (or at least until you hold down the Command key and drag them out). We’ll explore these buttons further later in the lesson.
Composing messages
Finally, to the message body—that large area at the bottom of the New Message window that begs to be filled. You could, of course, simply click in this area and start typing, but there are more interesting ways to fill this void. To see what I mean, let’s return to the toolbar.
Attach Document: This first button is one way to send one or more files along with your message. Click it and a navigation sheet appears, which you use to choose the documents that will be bundled with your message.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
There are many ways to communicate with others using the tools Apple provides—text, voice and video chats, and posts to social networking sites. But the one most frequently used by many of us is email. You create an account, compose a message, slap on an attachment if you like, add a recipient and subject heading, and send.
Some time ago, I showed you how to set up email accounts on your Mac through Mountain Lion’s Mail, Contacts & Calendars system preference. With this lesson we begin exploring the application you’ll use to create, send, and receive email messages—Apple’s Mail.
By default the Mail window is a fairly straightforward affair. Along the top you see the toolbar as well as a Search field. Just below the toolbar are heading for mailboxes you’ll routinely access. If you click the Show button in this area, a Mailboxes pane appears. Below this area is a list of messages contained within the selected mailbox. And to the right is the message area, which takes up the bulk of the window. Let’s take a look at the anatomy of the Mail window.
Below the bar
By default you will see five items below the toolbar—Show, Inbox, VIPs, Sent, and Drafts. We’ll look at the effects of clicking the Show button shortly. In the meantime, I’ll just explain that if you click one of the mailbox links you’ll see the contents of that mailbox listed in the messages pane. The number of unread messages will appear to the right of the mailbox listing—Inbox (25), for example.
The VIPs entry has a downward-pointing triangle next to it. Click this triangle and you can opt to view all VIPs or just one of your choosing. (I’ll explain VIPs in a future lesson.)
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Though not everyone cares to admit it, we all talk to our computers. Much of the time these conversations are quite short and comprised of ejaculations of joy or, when things aren’t going swimmingly, a grumbled #$%&@!! Regardless of what you say to your Mac, it always responds in the same way—with stoney silence. But it needn’t.
And it needn’t because Mountain Lion includes a dictation feature that lets your computer transcribe your spoken words in an impressive way. And if you’d care to have your Mac do the talking, another speech feature allows it to read selected text back to you with one of a group of human-sounding voices. The power to do each is found in the Dictation & Speech system preference.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week we explored the Users & Groups system preference. In that lesson I didn’t throughly explain the Parental Controls preference. Now’s the time.
It’s the unwise parent who grants their young child unguarded access to the Internet. Thankfully, Mountain Lion provides some protection with its built-in Parental Controls. If you’re concerned about what your child might see online—or are simply keen to limit the time your Mac-obsessed spawn spends in front of the computer—you should take a long look at Parental Controls.
Don’t have a child (or at least one who needs managing)? Parental Controls isn’t just for parents and kids. If you’re the more experienced Mac user in a household and are setting up a Mac for someone new to it, it’s not a terrible idea to impose some restrictions on that account. This isn’t for the purpose of protecting that person from iffy content, but rather to simplify the interface and keep them from getting lost.
Supervise their socializing
Every parent wants to socialize their child, but that doesn’t mean a responsible parent won’t keep an eye on who that child chooses to be social with. Parental Controls’ People tab can help. Here you find options to limit Game Center, Mail, and Messages. In the case of Game Center you have two options—Allow Joining Game Center Multiplayer Games and Allow Adding Game Center Friends. For Mail and Messages, in each case you click a Plus (+) button to add addresses or chat names to a sheet that appears. (These addresses can be pulled directly from your contacts, or you can create new contacts and, optionally, add them to the Contacts list.)
You can choose who the user can and can't communicate with.Read more »
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Throughout these Mac 101 lessons I’ve made references to your user folder, your account, and Administrators. And it’s possible that you’ve taken it on faith that I’ll explain what these things are and how they fit into all that is the Mac OS. Now is that time.
Mountain Lion, as was every other version of OS X before it, is a multiuser operating system. Think of it this way: You have a house and within it there are rooms for you, your mate, your daughter, and your son. Each room is arranged and decorated by the person who inhabits it. All your stuff is in your room and when you close the door, the other people living in that house have no idea what you’re doing with your stuff.
Now replace “house” with “Mac OS” and “room” with “user” and you’ve got the idea. You can have multiple user accounts on a single Mac, and each user has access to the applications on that Mac as well as their stuff—documents, movies, music, and so on.
Configuring a Group account
Creating an Administrator’s account works much the same way. The one account (other than Managed with Parental Controls) that requires a bit more explanation is the Group account. This is an account where you allow groups of certain users already registered on your Mac to have access to specific folders.
Let’s say, for example, you’ve set up standard user accounts for your four nephews—Pipeye, Peepeye, Pupeye, and Poopeye. Pipeye and Peepeye are upstanding young men and can be trusted. Pupeye and Poopeye, however, are pipe-smoking rapscallions. Within the Users & Groups preference you, as Administrator, go through the usual motions to create a new account, but this time you choose Group from the New Account pop-up menu.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
Last week I showed you how to connect your Mac to the Internet and to a local network. Now that your computer is on speaking terms with other devices and services, let’s examine exactly how you can put those powers of communication to use for sharing the devices and files associated with your Mac.
Sharing options for nearly everyone
To share elements of your computer with others, you must first grant permission for certain kinds of sharing to take place. You do this via the Sharing system preference, which you’ll find in the Internet & Wireless section of Mountain Lion’s System Preferences window. Once you’ve selected Sharing, you’ll see a number of options. We’ll start by looking at the ones you’ll use most frequently.
Advanced sharing options
We now venture into options intended for advanced users. Rather than confuse you with a lot of technical terms and convoluted explanations, I’ll lay out the gist of what the remainder of the sharing options do.
Remote Login: This sharing option allows you or other people to gain remote access to your computer’s files. To do so, they use something called the Secure Shell (or SSH) scheme. This scheme requires that the person attempting to log in know the username for the account you wish to access, the account’s password, and the computer’s IP address. (I discussed IP addresses when I discussed setting up your network.) As with File Sharing, you can choose to allow anyone in who has this information, or you can restrict access to individual users that you specify.
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. More by Christopher Breen
At one time, a typical Mac user would no more have connected a couple of computers to the Internet via a local network than they would have extracted their own kidney. If you just mentioned the word networking (outside the context of calling former business associates to seek a better job), those around you shook with fear.
Blessedly, those days are almost entirely over. Now, just about anyone can configure and join a network. Let’s see how it’s done.
A little background
About the Wi-Fi menu
If you’re using a Wi-Fi network, it’s worth your while to enable the Show Wi-Fi Status in Menu Bar option in the Network system preference. Do this and you can easily turn off Wi-Fi by choosing the Turn Wi-Fi Off command. Also, a helpful fan icon appears in the Mac’s menu bar. The number of black bars in that fan indicates the wireless network’s signal strength. If you see just one or two black bars, try moving closer to the wireless hotspot to increase the signal strength, as a poor signal can mean a slower connection.
But the Turn Wi-Fi Off command and the fan icon aren’t the only reasons to enable the Wi-Fi menu-bar option. You’ll also see many nearby wireless networks. Those that bear just a fan are open and those with a lock icon next to them require that you know the password to join the network.
